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TRUE  AND  FALSE  STANDARDS 
OF  GRADUATE  WORK 


BY 


ANDREW  F/WEST 

DEAN  OF  THE  GRADUATE  SCHOOL 
OF  PRINCETON  UNIVERSITY 


Read  in  Chicago  Friday,  March  31st,  1905,  at  the  Tenth  Annual  Meeting 
of  the  North  Central  Association  of  Colleges  and  Secondary  Schools. 


MARIS  132S' 


TRUE  AND  FALSE  STANDARDS  OF 
GRADUATE  WORK. 

We  need  not  stop  to  prove  at  the  outset  of  this 
discussion  that  the  liberal  arts  and  sciences  are  and 
must  be  the  central  and  regulative  part  of  every  true 
university.  This  body  of  studies  alone,  taken  in  its 
entirety,  presents  us  with  the  nearest  approach  to  a 
system  of  pure  knowledge  of  universal  value,  ever 
improving,  self-renewing,  growing  slowly  clearer, 
more  complete  from  age  to  age.  It  represents  to  us, 
as  no  other  body  of  studies  can,  the  sum  of  things 
best  worth  knowing  by  men  whose  object  is  to  follow 
truth  for  its  own  sake,  not  as  a  means  for  obtaining  a 
living,  nor  for  social  and  political  gain,  but  for  the 
sake  of  ordering  their  lives  in  accordance  with  the 
highest  ends.  It  was  not  without  some  glimpse  of 
this  truth  that  mediaeval  letters  referred  to  the  uni- 
versities of  Paris  and  Oxford  as  <'the  two  eyes  of 
Christendom,"  nor  was  it  without  like  insight  some 
of  the  oldest  university  documents  began  with  the 
phrase:  '*  We  seek  the  pearl  of  knowledge,  of  great 
price,  in  the  field  of  liberal  studies."  And  what  was 
thus  true  of  universities  at  their  birth  has  been  true  in 
every  generation  down  to  our  own  time  and  is  evi- 
denced in  many  ways — as,  for  instance,  in  the  fine 
declaration  of  Hofmann  in  his  address  as  Rector  of 
the  University  of  Berlin,  wherein  he  figured  the  lib- 
eral knowledge  enshrined  in  the  Philosophical  Fac- 
ulty as  ''  the  Palladium  of  the  Ideal."  And  so  it  is. 
Watch  the  wavering  fortunes  of  university  history. 
No  deterioration  in  the  purity  and  strength  of  intel- 
lectual standards  has  taken  place  without  affecting 
injuriously  these  studies.     No  great  wave  of  com- 

3 


mercial,  technical  or  other  utilitarian  influence  has 
swept  on  unchecked  into  university  life  without  dis- 
aster to  university  ideals.  And  no  great  period  of 
intellectual  illumination  and  advance  has  come  to  any 
university  in  all  the  time  of  recorded  history  except 
through  the  self-sacrificing  devotion  of  men  to  the 
cause  of  knowledge  as  embodied  in,  or,  at  least, 
as  closely  related  to  the  distinctively  liberal  arts  and 
sciences.     This  has  been  our  guiding  light  always. 

"  And  when  it  fails,  fight  as  we  will,  we  die  ; 
And  while  it  lasts,  we  cannot  wholly  end." 

A  university  may  have,  and  a  complete  univer- 
sity must  have,  more  than  this  central  faculty  of  arts 
and  sciences.  The  professional  and  technical  schools 
which  properly  round  out  the  circle,  so  far  from  be- 
ing despised  as  parts  of  a  university,  are  the  great 
appliances  which  connect  the  ideal  centre  of  know- 
ledge with  the  practical  needs  of  the  world.  A  law 
school,  a  medical  school,  an  engineering  school,  all 
derive  immense  benefit  by  being  placed  in  proper 
relation  to  the  central  faculty  of  arts  aud  sciences, 
and  give  back  many  benefits  in  turn.  But  no  aggre- 
gation of  professional  and  technical  schools  makes  a 
real  university,  because  such  an  aggregation  lacks  its 
vital  centre,  its  faculty  of  arts  and  sciences,  which 
alone  can  maintain  the  universal  standards  of  know- 
ledge in  all  their  exactness  and  rigor,  and  thus  relate 
and  steady  the  particular  standards  of  the  several 
professional  and  technical  schools. 

The  liberal  arts  and  sciences  fall  into  two  sec- 
tions. The  first  or  lower  section  is  the  undergradu- 
ate college  course  of  study,  the  one  thing  in  our 
higher  education  which  is  best  worth  preserving,  for 
this  alone  furnishes  the  best  basis,  which  is  always 


desired,  though  not  as  yet  generally  taken,  for  sub- 
sequent university  study,  whether  of  liberal  or  pro- 
fessional character.  So  I  need  not  argue  in  this  pres- 
ence that  to  preserve  and  develop  the  undergraduate 
college  education  in  its  purest  form  is  to  do  an  indis- 
pensable service  to  all  forms  of  graduate  study. 

Let  us  turn  at  once  to  the  graduate  work  and  con- 
fine our  attention  to  the  other  section  of  the  field  of 
liberal  studies.  Professional  and  technical  studies 
may  in  a  sense  be  depended  on  to  take  care  of  them- 
selves. They  will  always  flourish  so  long  as  men  are 
seeking  to  be  educated  in  order  to  make  a  profitable 
living.  But  graduate  work  in  liberal  studies  cannot 
be  maintained  on  this  basis,  because  the  end  aimed  at 
is  different.  For  if  the  pursuit  of  wealth  or  station 
is  the  end  aimed  at  by  a  man  who  thinks  he  is  giving 
himself  to  the  life  of  a  scholar,  he  is  not  aiming  at  a 
scholarly  end.  Consequently,  in  order  to  maintain 
its  own  standards,  a  true  graduate  school  in  the  lib- 
eral arts  and  sciences  must  depend  on  something  else 
to  sustain  it.  The  moment  it  becomes  an  employ- 
ment bureau  or  an  agency  for  finding  places,  a  sordid 
motive  enters,  and  it  is  in  danger  of  ceasing  to  be 
a  school  devoted  to  the  cause  of  truth  and  knowl- 
edge. Unless,  therefore,  the  life  of  the  scholar  is  to 
appeal  to  men  not  primarily  as  a  means  of  livelihood, 
but  because  they  cannot  help  following  the  scholar's 
life,  we  have  no  sufficient  basis  for  justifying  the 
maintenance  of  this  all-important  school.  And  if 
this  school  perishes  or  becomes  degraded,  you  may 
be  very  sure  that  sooner  or  later  every  valuable  func- 
tion of  the  university  will  be  injured. 

I  suppose  we  can  all  accept  heartily  the  state- 
ment that  the   chief  business  of   a    university  is  to 


maintain  standards, — to  determine,  inspect,  and  certify 
the  intellectual  and  moral  weights  and  measures.  I 
do  not  doubt  we  can  go  farther  and  agree  in  asserting 
that  this  maintenance  of  intellectual  and  moral  stand- 
ards is  acutely  needed  in  our  own  nation  at  this  time 
when  its  material  interests  are  becoming  so  vast  and 
complex.  And  this,  more  than  all  else,  is  the  pecul- 
iar and  pressing  duty  of  every  graduate  school  in 
liberal  studies.  Here  the  higher  teachers  of  the  na- 
tion are  being  trained.  Here  the  influences  which 
make  for  truth  and  reason  are  or,  at  least,  ought  to 
be  most  pure  and  uncontaminated.  The  service  to 
be  rendered  is  priceless,  the  need  is  urgent,  and  the 
fact  that  our  graduate  schools  in  liberal  studies,  pro- 
perly planned  and  guided,  are  specially  fitted  to  render 
this  service  is  the  fact  which  justifies  their  existence. 

It  therefore  becomes  a  matter  of  the  first  moment 
for  us  that  the  standards  of  graduate  work  should  be 
maintained  in  as  much  purity  as  our  means  and  intel- 
ligence permit.  We  know  they  will  not  be  perfect  at 
the  best,  but  we  also  know  that  if  we  maintain  them 
at  a  lower  level  than  we  ought,  even  according  to  our 
own  imperfect  conceptions  of  duty,  there  is  nothing 
to  keep  even  our  existing  standards  from  deteriorat- 
ing. The  duty  of  self-criticism  is  therefore  ever  with 
us,  not  only  if  we  are  to  improve,  but  if  we  are  to 
keep  what  we  have.  I  therefore  ask  you  to  look  for 
a  little  while  at  three  aspects  of  this  question  of  true 
and  false  standards  in  graduate  work, — namely,  our 
standards  of  knowledge,  our  standards  of  expres- 
sion, and  our  standards  of  judgment. 

I.  The  standards  of  knowledge  in  graduate 
work  are  especially  threatened  just  now  by  the  antag- 
onism of  an  unenlightened  specialization.      This  is  not 

6 


only  the  curse  of  the  specialization  which  does  not 
rest  on  a  sound  general  education,  but  in  a  degree  of 
all  specialization  which  does  not  limit  the  subdivision 
of  studies  by  some  consideration  of  the  intrinsic  value 
of  the  thing  studied.  What  knowledge  is  of  most 
worth?  is  the  fundamental  question  which  tests 
every  graduate  study  and  every  graduate  student,  as 
it  does  everyone  who  professes  to  be  a  thinker  in  any 
field  of  knowledge  at  any  stage  of  his  life.  It  has 
now  become  a  very  fair  question  whether  the  subdi- 
vision of  topics  has  not  gone  so  far  that  not  only  the 
perception  of  relative  values  is  clouded,  but  even  the 
community  of  intellectual  interests  among  our  higher 
students  is  being  destroyed.  Certainly  many  of  our 
scholars  seem  to  be  subjects  of  some  petty  principal- 
ity rather  than  freemen  in  the  commonwealth  of 
knowledge. 

It  is  a  matter  of  common  remark  that  many  of 
our  rising  students  in  science  are  only  too  ignorant 
of  literature,  many  philosophers  ignorant  of  science, 
and  many  literary  men  ignorant  of  both.  But  this  is 
not  the  full  extent  of  the  trouble.  iNIany  men, 
whether  in  science  or  philosophy  or  literature  or  his- 
tory, are  unacquainted  with  and  utterly  uninterested 
in  either  science  or  philosophy  or  literature  or  history 
as  a  whole.  We  may  subdivide  still  more  and  find 
that  one  philosopher  is  a  logician  only,  one  scientific 
man  a  biologist  only,  and  some  other  scholar  a  class- 
ical philologist  only.  Would  that  we  could  stop  here. 
But  we  must  go  on  until  we  discover  that  there  are 
many  who  are  familiar  only  with  some  subdivision  of 
a  division  of  their  logic  or  biology  or  philology. 
They  may  be  known  by  two  characteristics  :  The  first 
is  their  intensive    knowledge  of   a  small   portion  of 


some  subject,  which  is  all  very  well,  and  the  second 
is  their  extensive  ignorance  of  everything  outside  that 
small  portion  of  their  subject,  which  is  not  well  at 
all.  How  vividly  it  brings  out  the  point  of  Mon- 
taigne's satirical  story.  As  he  rode  across  the  plain 
one  morning,  he  encountered  a  company  of  gentlemen 
and  said  to  them  *'  Good  morning,  Messieurs,"  and  the 
leader  of  the  company  sharply  replied  '<  We  are  not 
Messieurs.  My  friend  here  is  a  grammarian  and  I  am 
a  logician."  Were  these  worthy  scholars  living  to- 
day, perhaps  they  would  not  be  able  to  profess  even 
so  much.  The  one  would  likely  be  a  student  of  some 
little  part  of  syntax  and  the  other  the  exploiter  of  a 
mechanical  device  for  grinding  out  some  special  re- 
sults of  the  use  of  the  syllogism.  This  again  may  be 
well  enough, provided  the  specialist  is  not  making  it  the 
end  of  his  intellectual  life,  provided  he  constantly 
realizes  that  the  only  valuable  specialization  lies  in 
studying  the  general  in  the  particular,  and  that  the 
relating  of  an  accurately  determined  particular  to  the 
general  is  the  only  thing  which  gives  the  results  of 
specialized  study  their  place  and  shows  their  size  in 
the  body  of  valuable  knowledge.  We  are  not  object- 
ing to  specialization — far  from  it, — but  solely  to  the 
study  of  the  unimportant.  And  this  may  take  many 
forms.  It  may  take  the  form  of  investigating  some- 
thing which,  when  ascertained,  is  found  to  be  a  trifle. 
Or  it  may  take  the  form  of  solemnly  proving  the  ob- 
vious by  an  elaborate  array  of  statistics,  as  when  we 
are  shown  conclusively  by  tables  of  percentages, 
which  have  been  tested  and  re-tested,  that  a  given 
number  of  children  born  and  bred  in  the  city,  com- 
pared with  the  same  number  born  and  bred  in  the 
country,  show  less  knowledge  of  the  different  kinds 


of  plants,  grains,  birds  and  beasts  than  do  their  rural 
compeers.  Of  the  same  nature  is  the  proof  1  read 
recently,  showing  minutely  and  beyond  the  shadow 
of  a  doubt  that  in  the  domain  of  ''  child  psychology  " 
there  was  a  marked  distinction  between  the  preferen- 
ces of  young  boys  and  girls  for  animal  pets,  more 
girls  than  boys  preferring  birds,  and  that  unkindness 
or  cruelty  to  an  animal  was  from  thirty  to  fifty  per 
cent,  more  shocking  to  a  girl  than  to  a  boy.  Does 
one  need  to  pursue  higher  university  studies  in  order 
to  know  this? 

A  force  which  is  always  operating  to  increase 
the  perplexities  of  the  situation  is  the  mania  for  pub- 
lication. It  is  assumed  that  production  of  original 
results,  published  so  all  may  have  a  chance  to  read 
and  test  them,  is  a  necessary  mark  of  the  higher 
scholarship.  Pressure  is  therefore  constantly  felt  by 
the  aspiring  young  candidate  to  justify  himself  in  the 
eyes  of  other  scholars  in  this  way.  Our  embryo 
Doctors  of  Philosophy  must  write  and  print  a  disser- 
tation. This  again  is  very  well,  if  the  man  who  is 
writing  the  dissertation  has  a  sensible  mind  and  is 
writing  about  something  that  needs  to  be  made  known. 
But  what  has  come  to  pass?  Another  deluge  I  The 
number  of  reviews,  scattered  articles  and  contribu- 
tions of  every  sort  in  any  one  great  subject,  such  as 
biology,  or  history,  or  chemistry,  or  classics,  is  so 
great  that  it  is  doubtful  whether  any  human  being 
can  read  in  ten  years  the  output  in  any  one  of  these 
subjects  for  one  year.  The  vast  mass  of  publications 
is  piling  up  unsifted,  unorganized,  and  therefore  un- 
available to  a  large  extent  for  future  use.  It  reminds 
us  a  little  of  what  Carlyle  said  about  the  voluminous 
archives  of  the  French  Revolution:     "The  French 


Revolution  consists  of  some  tons  of  manuscript  slowly 
rotting  in  the  European  libraries." 

The  menace  to  our  standards  of  knowledge  of- 
fered by  intemperate  specialization  is  thus  increased 
by  a  false  notion  as  to  what  scholarly  productivity  is. 
It  consists  not  only  in  the  advancement  of  knowledge, 
but  in  the  diffusion  of  knowledge,  and,  above  all,  it 
consists  primarily  in  the  advancement  and  diffusion  of 
the  more  valuable  knowledge.  And,  in  passing,  let 
us  ask  how  anyone  can  fail  to  see  that  the  question 
whether  a  certain  body  of  knowledge  is  new  or  old 
has  in  itself  nothing  to  do  with  the  question  of  rela- 
tive values.  Furthermore,  in  the  forming  of  a  great 
scholar  by  the  close  personal  touch  of  his  master 
there  is  a  far  nobler  form  of  productivity  than  the 
writing  of  even  an  important  dissertation.  As  a  rule, 
the  best  ''collected  works"  a  scholar  can  leave  is  a 
group  of  great  students.  In  the  light  of  such  con- 
siderations, is  it  not  clear  that  the  entirety  of  our 
standards  of  knowledge  is  being  menaced?  The  pure 
white  light  is  being  broken  into  the  many  beams  that 
compose  it,  and  many  there  are  who  see  not  even  so 
much  as  one  whole  color,  but  only  some  one  hue  of 
that  color  in  the  great  spectrum.  The  clear  organi- 
zation and  evaluation  of  the  knowledge  we  now  have 
seems  at  the  present  time  of  more  importance  than 
all  the  stray  advances  hither  and  thither. 

Our  standards  of  knowledge  therefore  need  to 
be  centered  in  the  general  body  of  ascertained  truth. 
We  must  take  our  position,  in  the  words  of  Francis 
Bacon,  that  **  philosophy  and  universality  are  not 
idle  studies,"  and  we  must  carry  this  so  far  as  to  be- 
lieve that  only  in  the  light  of  the  universal  shall  we 
understand  the  worth  and  bearing  of  the  particular. 


10 


And  as  the  only  available  practical  help  towards 
securing  this  attitude  of  mind  in  our  graduate  stu- 
dents, we  must  insist  on  a  clear  and  pure  preliminary 
training  in  liberal  college  studies,  followed  by  such  a 
training  in  their  graduate  work  as  constantly  keeps 
them  in  touch  with  the  community  of  intellectual  in- 
terests outside  their  special  field  of  study.  And  to 
secure  this  in  turn  we  should  aim  to  secure  as  grad- 
uate students  only  men  of  strong,  all-round  ability, 
open  vision  and  wide  sympathies.  In  short  we  must, 
first  of  all,  secure  the  right  kind  of  man  as  a  gradu- 
ate student.  Having  done  this,  we  may  rest  assured 
that  all  other  desirable  results  may  be  made  to  follow. 
2.  When  the  harmonious  standards  of  general 
knowledge  are  lost  sight  of,  particular  standards 
suited  to  one  or  another  specialty  are  apt  to  take 
their  place.  Partly  as  a  result  of  this,  there  comes  a 
corresponding  change  in  the  standards  of  expression. 
When  the  broad  view  is  lost,  simplicity  and  universal- 
ity of  statement,  and  a  consequent  attractiveness  and 
beauty  of  presentation,  are  apt  to  suffer.  It  is  not 
enough  that  a  book  or  dissertation  in  the  field  of 
scholarship  be  accurate  and  painstaking,  if  it  is  to 
survive  in  the  recollection  of  men.  As  we  review  in 
thought  the  books  and  papers  which  have  made  a 
mark  on  the  intellectual  life  of  any  period,  it  is  easy 
to  see  that  many  able  contributions  to  knowledge  have 
passed  into  oblivion  because  they  were  not  engaging 
and  readable,  whereas  one  of  the  distinctive  marks  of 
the  finest  class  of  such  compositions  is  their  convin- 
cing charm  of  style.  These  are  the  classics  of  sci- 
ence and  philosophy,  as  well  as  of  literature.  A 
scientific  writer  who  has  the  artist's  sense  has  thus 
an  advantage  over  his  equally  able  rival,  and  some- 


times  over  his  abler  rival,  who  lacks  this  sense.  Now 
one  of  the  most  evident  faults  of  the  mass  of  special- 
ized publications  which  now  occupy  the  main  place 
in  our  literature  of  scholarship  is  a  sort  of  solemn 
pedantry.  This  springs  from  the  entire  subordina- 
tion of  the  writer  to  his  restricted  theme,  and  to  the 
particular  technique  of  language  which  belongs  to 
his  specialty.  He  does  not  dominate  his  subject, 
but  is  mastered  by  it.  He  therefore  writes  too  much 
in  a  dialect,  and  not  in  a  literary  way.  He  becomes 
dry  and  lifeless.  Of  course  every  subject  and  every 
subdivision  of  a  subject  has  its  own  furniture  of  ideas 
and  must  make  use  of  the  technical  words  which 
alone  set  forth  these  ideas  accurately.  But  this  has 
been  fearfully  overdone.  If  it  sufficed  a  Newton  to 
define  the  elusive  atom — whether  rightly  or  wrongly 
is  of  no  importance  here — as  ''  the  least  part  of  mat- 
ter, ought  we  not  to  take  courage  from  his  example 
and  insist  that  technical  terms,  except  when  neces- 
sary, and  highly  formal  language,  and  in  fact  all 
forms  of  swollen  diction,  be  excluded  from  the  schol- 
ar's writing.  The  difficulty  of  the  ideas  is  sufficient 
without  enveloping  them  in  a  fog  of  words.  Let  us 
somehow  manage  to  keep  the  common  store  of  pure 
English  as  the  one  treasury  to  which  we  resort  for 
everything  common  English  words  can  express.  In 
this  way  alone  shall  we  be  able  to  preserve  a  general 
reading  interest  which  will  steadily  connect  the  pub- 
lications in  one  department  of  knowledge  with  the 
publications  in  another.  Descartes  has  said  that 
clearness  is  a  test  of  truth.  Without  going  so  far  as 
to  reverse  this  and  to  assert  that  obscurity  of  state- 
ment is  evidence  of  error,  we  may  at  least  use  the 
maxim  as  a  warning  to  all  men  who  are  prone  to 
write  in  a  formidable  technical  dialect. 

12 


One  other  thing  may  be  said  in  this  connection: 
Pretentiousness  of  any  sort  is  unscholarly,  whether 
it  be  in  the  form  of  conceit  as  to  the  value  of  one's 
own  thoughts  or  in  the  form  of  grave  pedantry  in 
proclaiming  them  to  others.  And,  lastly,  on  this 
point  it  may  be  asserted  that  the  man  who  is  a  slave 
to  a  technical  terminolog}^  is  in  constant  danger  of 
getting  away  from  the  concrete  truth  of  what  he  is 
studying  into  a  region  of  artificial  construction, 
where  he  is  so  much  occupied  with  the  scaffolding 
and  outer  appliances  that  he  mistakes  work  on  these 
for  work  on  the  real  building. 

3.  Back  of  all  standards  of  knowledge  and  ex- 
pression in  the  scholar's  life  lie  his  standards  of  judg- 
ment. On  these,  more  than  on  anything  else,  depend 
the  genuineness  and  permanence  of  w^hat  he  does. 
We  may  leave  geniuses  aside  in  this  discussion,  be- 
cause there  is  no  use  or  need  of  legislation  for  them, 
and  after  all  they  are  very  few  in  number,  supreme 
as  their  distinction  is.  And  yet,  even  in  the  case  of 
geniuses,  we  shall  find  more  instances  of  sound  com- 
mon sense  than  might  be  expected.  But  what  of  the 
mass  of  scholars?  What  is  to  be  the  ultimate  guar- 
antee to  mankind  generally  that  their  work  is  intrin- 
sically valuable,  whether  it  be  brilliant  or  plain,  ex- 
tensive or  limited,  commanding  or  humble?  Faraday 
somewhere  writes  that  the  education  of  the  judgment 
is  the  chief  benefit  of  a  scientific  training,  and  Hux- 
ley has  told  us  that  scientific  ability  in  its  last  analy- 
sis is  nothing  less  and  nothing  else  than  '*  trained 
common  sense."  How  this  throws  us  back  on  the 
personality  of  the  man  whom  we  are  to  encourage 
to  be  a  graduate  student!  It  thus  becomes  primarily 
the  question  not  of  what  he  can  know,  how  he  can 

13 


express  it,  or  how  much  he  can  do,  but  what  kind  of 
a  man   he   is.     The  reasonings  and  conclusions  of  a 
vain  man  will  be  tinged  with  vanity.     The  judgments 
of  a  man  ''  deep  versed  in  books,  but  shallow  in  him- 
self," will  not  permanently  appeal  to  the  respect  of 
his  fellow  men.     The  capricious  or  adventurous  or 
self-advertising  scholar  is,  so   far  forth,  not  a  true 
scholar.     The   fate   of    our  higher  studies,   in   their 
effect  on  the  men  we  influence,  depends  first  of  all 
on  what  kind  of  men  we  are.     The  kind  of  scholar 
any  man  is  to  become,  so  far  as  the  abiding  value  of 
his  influence  goes,  is  determined  in  the  last  resort 
not  so  much  by  what  he  knows  or  says  as  by  what 
he  believes  and  loves.     He  must  have  the  lover's  in- 
stinct, almost  the  art  of  divination.     Like  the  miner, 
he  must  have  the  eye  that  knows  the  ores  of  gold 
from  fool's  gold.     The  student  who  naturally  longs 
to  know  the  things  of  most  worth,  and  searches  for 
them  in  all  simplicity  and  sincerity,  and  purposes  to 
turn  all  to  the  best  account  by  making  his  acquire- 
ments accessible  and  serviceable  to  his  fellowmen,  is 
the  only  kind  of  man  who  ought  to  be  encouraged  to 
enter  our  graduate  schools.     And  this  kind  of  man 
is  most  naturally  bred  in  the  comradeship  of  our  col- 
lege life  and   in   the  atmosphere  of   liberal   studies. 
What  a  mistake  to  fail  in  any  way  to  make  our  grad- 
uate schools  supremely  attractive  to  just  this  sort  of 
man.      Given  the  personal  qualities  indicated  and  a 
suitable  college  training,  and  on  top  of  this  a  life  in 
graduate  studies  environed    by  the  friendships  that 
arise  from  the  constant  interchange  of  ideas  between 
men  studying  in  different  departments  of  knowledge, 
how  can  the  young  scholar,  so  circumstanced,  fail  to 
develop   that   ''trained    common   sense,"   that  well- 

14 


poised  judgment  which  must  enlighten  all  his  think- 
ing and  all  his  doing  if  he  is  to  be  the  scholar  we  are 
describing. 

It  has  often  been  debated  whether  the  theoretical 
or  the  practical  mind  is  the  higher  type.  If  the 
terms  are  used  in  their  proper  sense,  it  seems  to  me 
there  can  be  only  one  answer:  The  practical  mind  is 
the  better,  because  sound  judgment,  which  is  essen- 
tial to  all  sane  scholarship,  is  an  eminently  practical 
thing.  It  is  this  that  transforms  knowledge  into  wis- 
dom. The  brilliant  theoretical  scholar,  without  this 
balance,  is  structurally  weak.  But  let  us  not  misun- 
derstand what  this  practical  mind  is.  It  is  not  cut 
off  from  theory.  In  fact  the  highest  practical  schol- 
ars are  those  most  deeply  grounded  in  theoretical 
knowledge.  But  they  differ  from  the  merely  theoreti- 
cal scholars  in  being  able  to  use  that  knowledge 
steadily  in  applying  it  to  the  best  advantage,  and 
consequently  the  man  who  is  a  practical  scholar  in 
this  sense  is  the  only  one  who  unites  the  best  traits 
of  the  theoretical  and  practical  mind.  So  when  we 
see  men  of  flighty  judgment,  erratic  purposes,  and 
unsteady  effort,  let  us  keep  them  out  of  our  graduate 
schools  as  surely  as  we  keep  out  the  drone  or  ought 
to  keep  out  the  dullard. 

At  this  time,  more  than  ever  before,  business  and 
professional  life,  with  their  attractive  careers  and 
dazzling  rewards,  are  taking  most  of  the  able  men  of 
the  country.  The  attractions  of  the  scholar's  life 
are  not  relatively  as  great  as  they  were  a  generation 
ago,  nor  is  the  honor  paid  to  the  scholar  so  great  in 
our  land  as  in  the  older  civilizations  of  Great  Britain, 
France  and  Germany,  And  yet  on  the  little  band  of 
scholars  in  the  liberal  arts  and  sciences  depends,  more 

15 


than  ever  before,  the  tone  of  our  nation  in  things  in- 
tellectual and  moral.  We  have  already  too  many 
second-rate  and  third-rate  and  fourth-rate  men  among 
our  scholars.  We  shall  never  be  short  of  these. 
But  on  our  graduate  schools  in  the  liberal  studies 
rests  the  supreme  privilege  and  duty  of  standing 
more  resolutely  than  ever  for  the  best  standards  of 
knowledge,  expression  and  judgment,  so  that  the 
small  company  of  picked  men  who  are  best  fitted  by 
reason  of  their  high  manhood  to  become  our  best 
scholars  will  naturally  resort  to  our  graduate  schools 
and  lift  them,  and  with  them  the  higher  American 
scholarship,  to  a  level  never  attained  before.  And 
may  we  live  to  see  that  day ! 


i6 


PHOTOMOUNT 
PAMPHLET  BINDER 


PAT.    NO. 
677188 


Manufactured  by 

I  GAYLORD  BROS.  Inc 

Syracuse,  N.  Y, 

Stockton,  Calif. 


Date  Due 

""1 5'- 

r>  ;—       ■ 

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1 

j 

i 

1 

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LB2371  .W51 

True  and  false  standards  of  graduate 

Princeton  Theological  Semmary-Speer  Library 


1    1012  00005  5667 


